9 ms·

Calling for benefit–risk evaluations of Covid-19 control measures

51 points by mrfusion 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago
For all the calling for "follow the science", I don't see much scientific behavior in how the crisis is handled. I see lots of politics instead. For example, Dr Fauci says we won't achieve herd immunity before fall. But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. But that would mean herd immunity is impossible. Herd immunity totally relies on vaccinated people not being infectious. For another, Congressmen are outraged that some rich people are buying vaccines at $10,000 a dose. But Congressmen moved to the front of the line in December to get vaccinated, including the young & healthy ones. Politics.
- thirtyseven 6y ago
  We need people to keep wearing masks until there is herd immunity for the simple facts that a) you can't tell who is vaccinated or not by sight, and b) social pressure to wear them in public will collapse if X% of people stop wearing them.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    What they forgot is that pressure to get the vaccine has collapsed because the average person thinks there is no point. Public policy has to be smart.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      As long as we are constrained by vaccine supplies, it is rational to prioritize mask compliance rather than vaccine uptake.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        It's likely a matter of weeks at this point, the messaging on masking shouldn't be undermining messaging on vaccination when that is the case. Maybe 60 million doses shipping in March vs a total of 75 million from the start through today. (Pfizer believes production rate will about double over the next couple of weeks, Moderna has been steadily increasing, J&J likely to get approved).
        ummonk 6y ago
        60 million doses is only enough to vaccinate 10% of the American population. Vaccines likely won’t be available for every adult who wants one until well into May.
        maxerickson 6y ago
        Sure, I was pointing to the velocity increasing there more than thinking it was enough for everybody. Is the idea that if we have a couple months until wide availability we should have mask focused messaging for half the period regardless of how it impacts vaccination? Because in my mind, shots in arms are a lot more valuable than marginal mask behavior (which is already not that good because people have decided it's a serious infringement on their freedom).
      - lbeltrame 6y ago
        I would rather have policy push for interventions that have a better impact on transmission. While the latest ECDC report[1] says "use them, can't hurt", it acknowledges the lack of evidence of masks (and thus effectiveness) in preventing transmission in a community settings. [1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/covid-19-face-masks-community-first-update.pdf https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/cov...
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      > pressure to get the vaccine has collapsed Uh, no it hasn't. We don't have vaccines laying around going bad with nobody who wants them, but we do have plenty of people who want the vaccine who can't get it.
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        Look at the surveys. Is that percentage high enough to achieve herd immunity?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    That argument is political, not scientific. Exactly my point :-)
    - ivirshup 6y ago
      I don’t think behavioral psychology counts as politics.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Politics is behavioral psychology.
      - throwawayboise 6y ago
        It doesn't really count as science either.
    - war1025 6y ago
      Coronavirus policy has really helped me understand David Hume's point that you cannot derive and "ought" from an "is". You can't follow the science on something as complex as pandemics and lockdowns. There are too many tradeoffs that people will weigh differently.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  >> 'Herd immunity totally relies on vaccinated people not being infectious.' That's not accurate. Herd immunity only requires a vaccine reduce transmission rate sufficiently that R0 < 1. It doesn't require that R0 = 0. If the R0 for a vaccinated person = X, such that 0 < X < 1, wearing a mask likely puts it < X. Which is a desirable characteristic.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    To be clear, it requires R < 1, not R0 (which is the initial rate of spread). More importantly though, we don’t really need herd immunity - once everyone has had a chance to get vaccinated, the virus ceases to be an issue, as contracting covid is no different from contracting the cold or at worst the flu.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Not knowing the transmission rate means one can not make any predictions of herd immunity.
- rossng 6y ago
  We need to get to this point: (number of people vaccinated) * (vaccine effectiveness) > (herd immunity threshold) At this point, the R0 drops below 1 and the pandemic dies out by itself. However, if everyone keeps wearing masks, it looks more like this: (number of people vaccinated) * (vaccine effectiveness) + (mask effectiveness) * (number of people vaccinated) * (1 - vaccine effectiveness) > 1 This makes it easier to get R0 below 1 with fewer societal restrictions. Given that it's trivial for most people to wear masks, this seems like an obvious choice.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Why isn’t the answer just “those who are afraid of the virus can stay inside indefinitely” and no one else has to wear masks if they don’t want to? I don’t think it is “trivial” to wear masks - it makes breathing harder, it affects mental health (by not seeing people’s emotions), it makes communication harder for those with certain disabilities, and it makes every activity less enjoyable. After all if we really think there is no negative impact from wearing masks why not permanently require it all the time including at home? So then this comes down to a fuzzy tradeoff, which seems more like a values or politics based determination than a mathematical or scientific one.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Most vaccines are less than 100% effective at preventing infections. Vaccinate 10,000 people and intentionally expose them to the thing vaccinated against and you will get some infections. When there are significant numbers of infected people in the population, adding other measures to the protection provided by vaccines decreases the spread of the infection. I think the problem Fauci has is that he is confident that it is better to provide an answer than to hedge. It would be pretty reasonable for him to say something about getting vaccinations done as quickly as possible and evaluating what other measures are necessary once a larger percentage of the population is vaccinated.
- sjg007 6y ago
  >For example, Dr Fauci says we won't achieve herd immunity before fall. But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. An effective vaccine can mean 1, 2 or 3 different things. The first is that you don't get infected, the second is that if you do get infected that your disease course is mild, the 3rd is that you don't transmit it if you are infected.
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    If the vaccine just protects you and doesn't keep you from infecting others, then why are perfectly healthy 23-year-old healthcare workers getting it while there's still so many people over 65 waiting for it? And if it does keep you from infecting others, then why do you need to keep following the mask and social distancing rules even after you get it?
    - sjg007 6y ago
      The answer is that we don't know. We think it works but we don't know for sure, only time will tell.
- war1025 6y ago
  We self-isolated just as hard as anyone from March - May. I was looking at my Amazon orders and I'm coming up next week on the 1 year anniversary of when I bought a pair of pulse oximeters as a diagnostic early warning measure. In the summer, we started slowly going out more and doing things with people more. At this point, I think the country just needs to get on with life. Everyone around here knows a dozen or two people who have had it, and a handful of elderly people who died from it. It's a tragedy, but so is their treatment this past year. My Grandma is 98 and has gone downhill so significantly this past year from lack of interaction. At least now she's allowed to talk with the other residents of the nursing home. She spent six months locked in her room. And they all caught coronavirus anyway last fall. It's been clear since late Spring of last year that politics was driving the lockdowns far more than any real hard science.
  - throwawayyy1986 6y ago
    It was obvious when Cuomo was doing a victory lap book tour during the summer declaring that masks work and he figured out how to fix things, only for infections to pick up again when the season changed. I expect it'll be obvious in retrospect that human interventions had much less effect than thought, and the largest factors were a mix of demographics like obesity and nutrition, as well as geography (which influences sun exposure, humidity, etc.).
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  > But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. I wonder if, like when he "pushed" the numbers for the herd immunity threshold higher to push people to vaccinate he's deliberately omitting the data coming from Israel, which says that a full vaccination reduces the transmission of the virus and even prevents infection. This is what irks me of the current public health policies worldwide. Every "good" news must be buried under a pile of terrorizing, negative news, because those in charge foolishly believe that hope for an improved situation might lower compliance with non pharmaceutical interventions. In the end, they're either covering up for their failures (botched EU vaccine rollout) or just going to increase vaccine hesitancy (why bother, when everything stays the same?).
vecplane 6y ago
Could we have done this before we destroyed a significant percentage of small businesses with lockdowns? And what's the mortality rate for otherwise healthy people? Greater than 99.9%?
- throwaway888abc 6y ago
  Upvoted and adding relative story from a week ago It's middle of winter in Europe, old jacket got broken and you can't buy winter jacket because the non-essential shop are closed....
- hfsp 6y ago
  Nothing like a good crisis for the political-bureaucratic class to usurp power without debate on drawbacks and second order effects. Note government bureaucrats and politicians continued to collect a steady paycheck. Small businesses, RIP.
  - throwawayyy1986 6y ago
    It's funny how the anti-Amazon liberals have all been in full force demanding policy that ensures dominance of the huge corporations and obliterates all the mom-and-pop businesses.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  The infection fatality rate overall in the US is around 0.65%, meaning a 99.35% survival rate. For ages below 50, the survival rate is ~99.99% (https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-19-fatality-rate-including-asymptomatic-cases https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-1...). And it seems that controllable personal lifestyle choices like maintaining a balanced diet and getting outside may have played a role as well since Vitamin D deficiency increases chance for fatality from COVID-19 by 3.7x (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/942497 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/942497). I do think there is an injustice in draconian coronavirus measures because this is a low risk event ultimately. So by making everyone change their entire lives, we are making it so everyone gives something up so that those with a higher (but still low) risk can continue to go outside and partake in business, leisure, etcetera to a limited extent. This was the alternative to instead having just the risk averse or vulnerable quarantine themselves if they feel the odds are not agreeable (they could just self isolate and face nearly no risk). Put another way, lockdown measures and other mandates or restrictions trade the freedoms, leisures, financials, mental health, and stability of the young, healthy, and personally responsible to reduce the risk exposure of other people to an amount where the other people can live a slightly more normal life than otherwise. When I see children losing a year of socialization and education so that a small proportion of the very elderly can live slightly longer, I feel like we are making a disastrous tradeoff.
arnonejoe 6y ago
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Also ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On Experts paint a grim picture of the struggle with lockdown isolation — a “mental health pandemic” that should be treated as seriously as containing the coronavirus. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/world/europe/youth-mental-health-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/world/europe/youth-mental...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jdhn 6y ago
I really feel that at some point in the future, we're going to look back on lockdowns with a highly critical eye, and the people who were most vocal about supporting said lockdowns will be coming up with excuses as to why they supported them in the first place.
- lefrenchy 6y ago
  Excuses like “protectng human life in the face of uncertainty” seem valid. History should look back more fondly on someone who tried to save lives in the face of unknowns rather than gamble them. Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses. This is a multi-faceted issue, not a binary one.
  - caseysoftware 6y ago
    I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data, limited mitigation strategies, few treatments, and no vaccines. A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.
    - 1experience 6y ago
      > I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data Ordinary people had little trusted data. Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w [2] https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/16/news/coronavirus_studio_il_50-75_dei_casi_a_vo_sono_asintomatici_e_molto_contagiosi-251474302/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I251454518-C12-P3-S2.4-T1 https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I wonder if discussion of this article will get banned on Twitter.
goalieca 6y ago
Unicef and others have compiled reports but they have gotten very little press coverage for instance. There's many stats and models there. >An additional 6.7 million children under 5 could suffer from wasting in the next 12 months. https://data.unicef.org/covid-19-and-children/ https://data.unicef.org/covid-19-and-children/ > Almost 200,000 additional stillbirths could occur over the next 12 months due to the impact of COVID-19
- josephcsible 6y ago
  Why do so many articles use the phrasing "due to COVID-19" instead of "due to the lockdowns"?
  - belltaco 6y ago
    If a road accident victim dies due to not getting ICU because all are full, one could say he died of secondary causes of covid. No Covid and he'd have survived.
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      But those aren't the kinds of things I'm talking about. I'm talking about things that only happen because we locked down, and that wouldn't have happened had we let the virus run completely unchecked.
  - throwaway888abc 6y ago
    It's much more acceptable / justifiable creating positive perception (brain washing) in broad audience. Old repetition marketing rule. In advertising, the effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency
  - mrzimmerman 6y ago
    Probably because that’s in accurate and reductionist: > While children appear to be largely spared the direct mortality impacts of COVID-19, the indirect effects stemming from strained health systems and disruptions to life-saving health services such as immunization and antenatal care, can result in devastating increases in child deaths. The pandemic threatens to reverse decades of progress made around the world toward eliminating preventable child deaths. According to a study covering 118 low- and middle-income countries by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an additional 2 million under-five deaths could occur in just twelve months due to reductions in routine health service coverage levels and an increase in child wasting. Children are suffering because of strained healthcare systems, which isn’t because of their city being locked down. Reduction in routine healthcare could be caused by lockdown but it’s just as likely that parents are choosing to put off care out of fear (as a personal choice, not mandated) or because they can’t get it because the place they would go to is too busy because of Covid patients.
gfodor 6y ago
The still unspeakable one is it may turn out that the public’s widespread belief that cloth or surgical masks are protective may, on net, have led many to use them in situations where they would have otherwise simply have stayed home. Given the increasing evidence that a single, loosely fitting, or non-medical grade mask provided less than perfect protection, it could turn out a message like “stay home unless you had a N95 or kn95” may have been much better. (Along with a federal manhattan project to make and distribute these to as many as possible.) Given the literal lies we were told early on that masks were not effective at all, due to concerns about PPE supply, I worry that those same concerns may have led to messaging on mask that downplayed the difference between good PPE and non n95 masks. The second order consequences of this seem possibly quite bad.
throwawayboise 6y ago
Long overdue. Should have been started last April, after the initial "flatten the curve" had been achieved.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Restrictions were rolled back in April, at least in much of the US. Not fully, but we have had a lot more variation that people complaining that it's a lockdown would have you think. Eventually we will probably be able to make some comparisons, what happened in Florida vs say, Los Angeles, and so on.

51 points by mrfusion 6y ago

For all the calling for "follow the science", I don't see much scientific behavior in how the crisis is handled. I see lots of politics instead. For example, Dr Fauci says we won't achieve herd immunity before fall. But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. But that would mean herd immunity is impossible. Herd immunity totally relies on vaccinated people not being infectious. For another, Congressmen are outraged that some rich people are buying vaccines at $10,000 a dose. But Congressmen moved to the front of the line in December to get vaccinated, including the young & healthy ones. Politics.

thirtyseven 6y ago
We need people to keep wearing masks until there is herd immunity for the simple facts that a) you can't tell who is vaccinated or not by sight, and b) social pressure to wear them in public will collapse if X% of people stop wearing them.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  What they forgot is that pressure to get the vaccine has collapsed because the average person thinks there is no point. Public policy has to be smart.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    As long as we are constrained by vaccine supplies, it is rational to prioritize mask compliance rather than vaccine uptake.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      It's likely a matter of weeks at this point, the messaging on masking shouldn't be undermining messaging on vaccination when that is the case. Maybe 60 million doses shipping in March vs a total of 75 million from the start through today. (Pfizer believes production rate will about double over the next couple of weeks, Moderna has been steadily increasing, J&J likely to get approved).
      - ummonk 6y ago
        60 million doses is only enough to vaccinate 10% of the American population. Vaccines likely won’t be available for every adult who wants one until well into May.
        maxerickson 6y ago
        Sure, I was pointing to the velocity increasing there more than thinking it was enough for everybody. Is the idea that if we have a couple months until wide availability we should have mask focused messaging for half the period regardless of how it impacts vaccination? Because in my mind, shots in arms are a lot more valuable than marginal mask behavior (which is already not that good because people have decided it's a serious infringement on their freedom).
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      I would rather have policy push for interventions that have a better impact on transmission. While the latest ECDC report[1] says "use them, can't hurt", it acknowledges the lack of evidence of masks (and thus effectiveness) in preventing transmission in a community settings. [1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/covid-19-face-masks-community-first-update.pdf https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/cov...
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    > pressure to get the vaccine has collapsed Uh, no it hasn't. We don't have vaccines laying around going bad with nobody who wants them, but we do have plenty of people who want the vaccine who can't get it.
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      Look at the surveys. Is that percentage high enough to achieve herd immunity?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  That argument is political, not scientific. Exactly my point :-)
  - ivirshup 6y ago
    I don’t think behavioral psychology counts as politics.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Politics is behavioral psychology.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      It doesn't really count as science either.
  - war1025 6y ago
    Coronavirus policy has really helped me understand David Hume's point that you cannot derive and "ought" from an "is". You can't follow the science on something as complex as pandemics and lockdowns. There are too many tradeoffs that people will weigh differently.
lostcolony 6y ago
>> 'Herd immunity totally relies on vaccinated people not being infectious.' That's not accurate. Herd immunity only requires a vaccine reduce transmission rate sufficiently that R0 < 1. It doesn't require that R0 = 0. If the R0 for a vaccinated person = X, such that 0 < X < 1, wearing a mask likely puts it < X. Which is a desirable characteristic.
- ummonk 6y ago
  To be clear, it requires R < 1, not R0 (which is the initial rate of spread). More importantly though, we don’t really need herd immunity - once everyone has had a chance to get vaccinated, the virus ceases to be an issue, as contracting covid is no different from contracting the cold or at worst the flu.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Not knowing the transmission rate means one can not make any predictions of herd immunity.
rossng 6y ago
We need to get to this point: (number of people vaccinated) * (vaccine effectiveness) > (herd immunity threshold) At this point, the R0 drops below 1 and the pandemic dies out by itself. However, if everyone keeps wearing masks, it looks more like this: (number of people vaccinated) * (vaccine effectiveness) + (mask effectiveness) * (number of people vaccinated) * (1 - vaccine effectiveness) > 1 This makes it easier to get R0 below 1 with fewer societal restrictions. Given that it's trivial for most people to wear masks, this seems like an obvious choice.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Why isn’t the answer just “those who are afraid of the virus can stay inside indefinitely” and no one else has to wear masks if they don’t want to? I don’t think it is “trivial” to wear masks - it makes breathing harder, it affects mental health (by not seeing people’s emotions), it makes communication harder for those with certain disabilities, and it makes every activity less enjoyable. After all if we really think there is no negative impact from wearing masks why not permanently require it all the time including at home? So then this comes down to a fuzzy tradeoff, which seems more like a values or politics based determination than a mathematical or scientific one.
maxerickson 6y ago
Most vaccines are less than 100% effective at preventing infections. Vaccinate 10,000 people and intentionally expose them to the thing vaccinated against and you will get some infections. When there are significant numbers of infected people in the population, adding other measures to the protection provided by vaccines decreases the spread of the infection. I think the problem Fauci has is that he is confident that it is better to provide an answer than to hedge. It would be pretty reasonable for him to say something about getting vaccinations done as quickly as possible and evaluating what other measures are necessary once a larger percentage of the population is vaccinated.
sjg007 6y ago
>For example, Dr Fauci says we won't achieve herd immunity before fall. But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. An effective vaccine can mean 1, 2 or 3 different things. The first is that you don't get infected, the second is that if you do get infected that your disease course is mild, the 3rd is that you don't transmit it if you are infected.
- josephcsible 6y ago
  If the vaccine just protects you and doesn't keep you from infecting others, then why are perfectly healthy 23-year-old healthcare workers getting it while there's still so many people over 65 waiting for it? And if it does keep you from infecting others, then why do you need to keep following the mask and social distancing rules even after you get it?
  - sjg007 6y ago
    The answer is that we don't know. We think it works but we don't know for sure, only time will tell.
war1025 6y ago
We self-isolated just as hard as anyone from March - May. I was looking at my Amazon orders and I'm coming up next week on the 1 year anniversary of when I bought a pair of pulse oximeters as a diagnostic early warning measure. In the summer, we started slowly going out more and doing things with people more. At this point, I think the country just needs to get on with life. Everyone around here knows a dozen or two people who have had it, and a handful of elderly people who died from it. It's a tragedy, but so is their treatment this past year. My Grandma is 98 and has gone downhill so significantly this past year from lack of interaction. At least now she's allowed to talk with the other residents of the nursing home. She spent six months locked in her room. And they all caught coronavirus anyway last fall. It's been clear since late Spring of last year that politics was driving the lockdowns far more than any real hard science.
- throwawayyy1986 6y ago
  It was obvious when Cuomo was doing a victory lap book tour during the summer declaring that masks work and he figured out how to fix things, only for infections to pick up again when the season changed. I expect it'll be obvious in retrospect that human interventions had much less effect than thought, and the largest factors were a mix of demographics like obesity and nutrition, as well as geography (which influences sun exposure, humidity, etc.).
lbeltrame 6y ago
> But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections. I wonder if, like when he "pushed" the numbers for the herd immunity threshold higher to push people to vaccinate he's deliberately omitting the data coming from Israel, which says that a full vaccination reduces the transmission of the virus and even prevents infection. This is what irks me of the current public health policies worldwide. Every "good" news must be buried under a pile of terrorizing, negative news, because those in charge foolishly believe that hope for an improved situation might lower compliance with non pharmaceutical interventions. In the end, they're either covering up for their failures (botched EU vaccine rollout) or just going to increase vaccine hesitancy (why bother, when everything stays the same?).

vecplane 6y ago

Could we have done this before we destroyed a significant percentage of small businesses with lockdowns? And what's the mortality rate for otherwise healthy people? Greater than 99.9%?

throwaway888abc 6y ago
Upvoted and adding relative story from a week ago It's middle of winter in Europe, old jacket got broken and you can't buy winter jacket because the non-essential shop are closed....
hfsp 6y ago
Nothing like a good crisis for the political-bureaucratic class to usurp power without debate on drawbacks and second order effects. Note government bureaucrats and politicians continued to collect a steady paycheck. Small businesses, RIP.
- throwawayyy1986 6y ago
  It's funny how the anti-Amazon liberals have all been in full force demanding policy that ensures dominance of the huge corporations and obliterates all the mom-and-pop businesses.
throwawaysea 6y ago
The infection fatality rate overall in the US is around 0.65%, meaning a 99.35% survival rate. For ages below 50, the survival rate is ~99.99% (https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-19-fatality-rate-including-asymptomatic-cases https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-1...). And it seems that controllable personal lifestyle choices like maintaining a balanced diet and getting outside may have played a role as well since Vitamin D deficiency increases chance for fatality from COVID-19 by 3.7x (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/942497 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/942497). I do think there is an injustice in draconian coronavirus measures because this is a low risk event ultimately. So by making everyone change their entire lives, we are making it so everyone gives something up so that those with a higher (but still low) risk can continue to go outside and partake in business, leisure, etcetera to a limited extent. This was the alternative to instead having just the risk averse or vulnerable quarantine themselves if they feel the odds are not agreeable (they could just self isolate and face nearly no risk). Put another way, lockdown measures and other mandates or restrictions trade the freedoms, leisures, financials, mental health, and stability of the young, healthy, and personally responsible to reduce the risk exposure of other people to an amount where the other people can live a slightly more normal life than otherwise. When I see children losing a year of socialization and education so that a small proportion of the very elderly can live slightly longer, I feel like we are making a disastrous tradeoff.

arnonejoe 6y ago

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Also ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On Experts paint a grim picture of the struggle with lockdown isolation — a “mental health pandemic” that should be treated as seriously as containing the coronavirus. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/world/europe/youth-mental-health-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/world/europe/youth-mental...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jdhn 6y ago

I really feel that at some point in the future, we're going to look back on lockdowns with a highly critical eye, and the people who were most vocal about supporting said lockdowns will be coming up with excuses as to why they supported them in the first place.

lefrenchy 6y ago
Excuses like “protectng human life in the face of uncertainty” seem valid. History should look back more fondly on someone who tried to save lives in the face of unknowns rather than gamble them. Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses. This is a multi-faceted issue, not a binary one.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data, limited mitigation strategies, few treatments, and no vaccines. A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.
  - 1experience 6y ago
    > I think this was a valid mindset last March when we had little trusted data Ordinary people had little trusted data. Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w [2] https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/16/news/coronavirus_studio_il_50-75_dei_casi_a_vo_sono_asintomatici_e_molto_contagiosi-251474302/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I251454518-C12-P3-S2.4-T1 https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I wonder if discussion of this article will get banned on Twitter.

goalieca 6y ago

Unicef and others have compiled reports but they have gotten very little press coverage for instance. There's many stats and models there. >An additional 6.7 million children under 5 could suffer from wasting in the next 12 months. https://data.unicef.org/covid-19-and-children/ https://data.unicef.org/covid-19-and-children/ > Almost 200,000 additional stillbirths could occur over the next 12 months due to the impact of COVID-19

josephcsible 6y ago
Why do so many articles use the phrasing "due to COVID-19" instead of "due to the lockdowns"?
- belltaco 6y ago
  If a road accident victim dies due to not getting ICU because all are full, one could say he died of secondary causes of covid. No Covid and he'd have survived.
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    But those aren't the kinds of things I'm talking about. I'm talking about things that only happen because we locked down, and that wouldn't have happened had we let the virus run completely unchecked.
- throwaway888abc 6y ago
  It's much more acceptable / justifiable creating positive perception (brain washing) in broad audience. Old repetition marketing rule. In advertising, the effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency
- mrzimmerman 6y ago
  Probably because that’s in accurate and reductionist: > While children appear to be largely spared the direct mortality impacts of COVID-19, the indirect effects stemming from strained health systems and disruptions to life-saving health services such as immunization and antenatal care, can result in devastating increases in child deaths. The pandemic threatens to reverse decades of progress made around the world toward eliminating preventable child deaths. According to a study covering 118 low- and middle-income countries by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an additional 2 million under-five deaths could occur in just twelve months due to reductions in routine health service coverage levels and an increase in child wasting. Children are suffering because of strained healthcare systems, which isn’t because of their city being locked down. Reduction in routine healthcare could be caused by lockdown but it’s just as likely that parents are choosing to put off care out of fear (as a personal choice, not mandated) or because they can’t get it because the place they would go to is too busy because of Covid patients.

gfodor 6y ago

The still unspeakable one is it may turn out that the public’s widespread belief that cloth or surgical masks are protective may, on net, have led many to use them in situations where they would have otherwise simply have stayed home. Given the increasing evidence that a single, loosely fitting, or non-medical grade mask provided less than perfect protection, it could turn out a message like “stay home unless you had a N95 or kn95” may have been much better. (Along with a federal manhattan project to make and distribute these to as many as possible.) Given the literal lies we were told early on that masks were not effective at all, due to concerns about PPE supply, I worry that those same concerns may have led to messaging on mask that downplayed the difference between good PPE and non n95 masks. The second order consequences of this seem possibly quite bad.

throwawayboise 6y ago

Long overdue. Should have been started last April, after the initial "flatten the curve" had been achieved.

maxerickson 6y ago
Restrictions were rolled back in April, at least in much of the US. Not fully, but we have had a lot more variation that people complaining that it's a lockdown would have you think. Eventually we will probably be able to make some comparisons, what happened in Florida vs say, Los Angeles, and so on.